“Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin is a novel about work, video games, loss and love (in the ambiguous, or rather, extended, meaning “love” has in English).

The beautiful cover of the book

That it is mostly a novel about work was said by the author herself, an American of Russian, Jewish and Korean descent, multicontinental we could say, as nearly every character in the book. The work she is talking about is the creative labour of those who invent, write and develop video games; and people in the industry will be pleased to finally see the work of independent game makers portrayed with some fidelity, beyond some inevitably romanticised aspects.

The protagonists are a man, Sam Masur aka Mazer (as in Labyrinth Builder), and a woman, Sadie Green. Sam and Sadie know each other as kids playing computer games together, and when they grow up they both choose careers in the industry as authors and developers. Authors and developers may be two different positions, but here we are talking, at least at first, about indies in the strict sense, where it may occur that the roles overlap. But there is also a third main character, Marx Watanabe (that’s his first name, Marx), who doesn’t know how to code or design video games, becoming their producer, and many other things. I’m being vague because it’s one of those novels where the plot is better revealed by the book, and there’s a nice mixture of successes and failures that make any spoiler devastating.

In fact, Zevin seems great at narrating failures, so skilled and so life-like that you don’t know what to expect. In fiction, you often see the touch of the narrative’s architect. If it’s a reassuring story, you know it’s going to be alright, in the worst case if it’s action – and action stories are almost always reassuring, especially action films – there will be someone who has to sacrifice himself in the finale to make the good guys win. If it’s a sad or somber story, there will be a series of misfortunes and what could go wrong will go tragically.

This book is not like that. For each love relationship, you don’t know if it is going to last: will they break up? And will they break up well or badly? You don’t even know if a relationship is going to come into existence: will they ever get together? For each game title, you don’t know if it is going to be successful: will it be liked? will it be sold well? liked but unsold? sold but unliked? And how will the game authors take it? Every friendship in the story has the same fragility; actually, the fragility of friendship is another big theme of the book. And every living body in the story is also fragile: will cancer be healed? will disability be fixed? will sex issues be solved? will someone have an accident?

And of course here enters the metaphor, already heard so many times but also rightly so because it is gives a lot of insight about the video game medium, about endless lives. Usually in video games you can be born again, you can “respawn” somewhere else after death. Mistakes are corrected by trying again. The book treats beautifully the subject of loss, including bereavement, as something that doesn’t quite work like respawning, but neither like the opposite of it. There is a poignant passage saying that when someone dies, the survivors carry around a kind of simplified – algorithmic I daresay – version of the dead person, built on their memories of the departed individual. What would the dead say if they were still here? Those who knew them well can try to imagine it; but of course the ghost-in-a-box owned by the survivors does not have the complexity, depth, and capacity to create new thoughts of a whole, living mind; it is only a bunch of synapses set in motion to simulate an entire brain irretrievably gone; and for that matter, even a mind without a body, living only by watching others live, would not be like the original person. And then, the book says, gradually this ghost withers away, it becomes harder and harder to remember the physical and intellectual details of the absent person. Very different from respawning. And also different from how an actor rehearses a thousand times a scene in which their character dies, as displayed in a tasty scene of the novel (Zevin knows, and explains, that theatre and video games are related).

I’m reading another, earlier novel by Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry), and it seems to me that talking about coping with loss and defeat is something at which she truly excels. When the blow comes, it is devastating, it is an atomic bomb that leaves a crater to sink into; and everyone sinks in their own way. As the reader hopes with every page, something eventually happens, patiently, and the grief is processed, but never put aside; it is not overcome by words, but by praxis. Something happens, or someone.

The way I’m talking about it, there seems to be a lot of sentimentality. And here I would like to say: no, there is sentiment but no sentimentality. Truth be told, though, there is indeed sentimentality: the story endeavours to make you cry with commotion all the time and, at least with me, it succeeds; but it is a concrete, practical sentimentality. You can be moved by what happens in the coding for a video game or to a character’s foot, or by an object left on a desk. Matter matters.

And video games matter. They are not an arbitrary narrative pretext, such as “Well, the main characters had to have some passion and some profession, so let’s make it computer games, but we could also make it that they were crime reporters and it pretty much worked the same…” No. This book is really about people making video games, it’s not an allegory of something else or a colour element. There is the creative furor of people who want to make a “deep” game, with early attempts at a roman à clef game, with a provocative message, and then the artsy game, with its unique narrative and aesthetic. A short game is mentioned that is made for assignment in a game development class, Emily Blaster, a kind of poetic arcade game based on the poems of Emily Dickinson; and in the real world Dan Vecchitto has been commissioned by the publisher to actually make it, and it can be found linked from the author’s site. As the characters’ careers begin to ripen, there is market positioning, the dilemmas in corporate choices, the ongoing tension between doing what one would like to do and doing what makes sense on the market. There are the tense discussions about partnerships, about where to establish an office, about the final title to give to an almost ready game (brilliant pages where the initial proposal is calling it Love Doppelgängers…). There is the relationship with the mass media. There are the sequels, the self-citations, the more or less toxic communities of gamers, and the advancing technology, from making your own graphics engines to online multiplayer. I think the book succeeds in the almost impossible feat of talking about this industry in a way that works for connoisseurs and laymen alike; and for the nitpickers, in the appendix it explains the literary licences the author took, displaying gatekeeper-proof competence.

There is also politics, a little bit. I would have enjoyed more of it but you know how I am. Zevin is a liberal: I settle for the character called Marx. There is politics inside the video games, which gradually talk about fascism, immigration and mixed cultural identities, and sexual rights; a video game where you can get marriages between same-sex avatars enters the political debate, and this creates a number of important consequences – the story is not set in the present day, but a little earlier, when it could still make a scandal.

I believe this book is bound to become the novel about digital-game makers. It is surprising that it took so long for one to come out, but it probably needed some of the revolutions that have happened in the industry. From now on it will have the authority of a classic, so read it if you’re in the business, and if you’re not in the business read it anyway and maybe you’ll want to be in the business, like when you read Agatha Christie and for a while you hope to see a murder in a mansion as soon as possible.